 |
|
Pimp My Desi Ride |
…describe the most famous car strutting along India’s roads today, think of some of the qualities associated with hot automotive design….Sleek. Sporty. Sexy. Fast.
Now throw them out….None of those words applies to the Ambassador.
And in the Amby, we find a microcosm of Indian economic history -
TRACE the car’s journey through the last half-century and you can chart the rise of India’s post-colonial ruling class, its flirtation with socialism and its recent economic boom that has the world abuzz.
…As I journeyed all over India,” wrote Singh, who died in 1999, “I came to understand that if one thing can be singled out to stand for the past 50 years of India and its closed economy, now open and moving into the new millennium, it has to be the Ambassador.”
As they say, sometimes a dog’s so ugly, it’s actually cute and perhaps when a car is & remains this backwards, it’s easy to wax nostalgic. Whatever the case, the humble Ambassador turns 50 this year and given the transience of modern life, it’s hard not to take notice…
You can’t be desi and have spent anytime in da homeland without being able to relate to stories like this - “…police in north India once stopped an Ambassador with 27 people on board”
 |
|
A Thousand Wedding Garlands Await… |
The engines currently available are a 75 bhp petrol engine and a 50 bhp (37.3 kW) Isuzu diesel engine.
… And yet, somehow, that little 75bhp engine was able to claw its way up the washed out hill road to my grandparent’s house. Crazy. Alas, nearly every other aspect of the car falls in the same bucket -
“Dynamically, it’s one of the most unstable cars you can drive today,” said Bijoy Kumar Y, the editor of Business Standard Motoring. “The suspension is the same that it’s been for ages; they haven’t touched it. Going in a straight line, the Ambassador is fine. But when you have to brake, when you have to go around a corner, when you carry people who are very dear to you, I wouldn’t go with it.”
Kumar and others also fault the Ambassador for lacking contemporary safety features such as crumple zones, anti-lock brakes and air bags. India does not have stringent safety standards for cars, but industry observers say such standards may be adopted in the next few years.
“It’s nice to be romantic about the car,” Kumar said. “I was born in the hospital and brought home in an Ambassador…. But as a motoring journalist, I’m feeling guilty that this car is being produced.”
Methinks the other 26 people on board are a fine substitute for crumple zone. 
So while the rest of the world marched on through the post WWII economic boom, India was locked in a socialist arranged marriage to the Ambassador, a vehicle that can trace it’s original design to the British Morris Oxford of 1956. Why? Well, as with many things in life, blame the License Raj -
In the car’s glory days, the government’s protectionist quotas and tariffs meant there was almost no competition. The joke was that you could buy any car you wanted in India — as long as it was an Ambassador….WITH little to challenge it, the car rolled off the factory floor for decades looking and performing almost exactly the way it did in 1957.
And, intrinsic to just about any government involvement in market allocations, bureaucratic discretion inevitably became its own tradeable good. The system put up the roadblocks that only spiff money could remove -
The Ambassador plant in Uttarpara, near Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, produced 30,000 units a year. Demand so outstripped supply that buyers languished on waiting lists for months, even years. Those with connections, or a little extra cash for purposes of encouragement, got theirs first.
Whatever the case, those with a nostalgic lust can visit Hindustan Motor’s inexplicably slick Ambassador web page and design their own just like Uncle used to drive or discover the top 10 reasons to own your own piece of automotive history.
.jpg){kind=link}